Mrugesh Mohapatra 🇮🇳

There is a lot more to the Oracle layoffs than what meets the eye. Trump stood at the White House in January 2025 and said Stargate would create "100,000 American jobs almost immediately." Larry Ellison was standing next to him. This morning, Oracle -- not just a Stargate partner, but the primary builder and physical operator of every Stargate data center -- sent the first of 30,000 of its own workers a termination email at 6 a.m. No manager was looped in. System access was cut on delivery. The email was signed "Oracle Leadership." Here is the part worth sitting with: The 100,000 jobs Trump announced are construction workers. Concrete. Steel. Cooling systems. Temporary site labor across Texas, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Michigan. Real jobs, yes, but they end when the buildings are done. The 30,000 fired today are software engineers, cloud architects, SaaS operators, healthcare IT workers. The people who built the systems those data centers are being built to run. Permanent careers. Gone in a single email before sunrise. Oracle is not struggling. It posted $6.13 billion in profit last quarter. Up 95% year-over-year. It is cutting workers because it owes $248 billion in data center lease commitments that do not appear on its balance sheet. It is cutting workers because it committed to $50 billion in AI infrastructure spending this fiscal year alone. It is cutting workers because the $300 billion OpenAI contract it signed -- the one that made Ellison briefly the richest person on earth -- does not generate revenue until 2027. Bloomberg reported three weeks ago, citing internal Oracle sources, that the cuts targeted "roles the company expects AI to make redundant." The termination email said "broader organizational change." Oracle told 30,000 employees: organizational change. Oracle told Bloomberg: AI. Oracle told investors: the plan is working. Oracle told America: 100,000 jobs. All four are technically true. Oracle's stock was up 5% while the emails were still landing.

🦔 Oracle laid off between 20,000 and 30,000 employees Tuesday morning, roughly 18% of its global workforce, via a single email sent at 6am EST with no prior warning. System access was revoked almost immediately after. The cuts are expected to free up $8-10 billion in cash flow. Oracle's stock has lost more than half its value since September 2025 and the company now carries over $124 billion in debt, up from $89 billion a year ago, with free cash flow running negative $10 billion last quarter. My Take Oracle posted a 95% jump in net income last quarter and still eliminated 18% of its workforce by email before most people finished their morning coffee. This is not a company in distress in the traditional sense. It's a company that made an enormous debt-funded bet on AI infrastructure and is now converting its workforce into cash flow to service that debt. We've covered Oracle's AI gamble for months. The $300 billion OpenAI deal through Stargate, $50 billion in capital expenditure this fiscal year, over $124 billion in total debt. Multiple US banks have pulled back from financing Oracle-linked data center projects. Bondholders have sued Oracle claiming it concealed how much additional debt the OpenAI deal would require. The credit default swap spread hit a three-year high earlier this year, meaning debt investors are genuinely nervous about getting paid back. The workers who got that 6am email built the products Oracle has monetized for decades. The bet that eliminated their jobs was made by people who were already paid regardless of how it turns out. That is the part of the AI infrastructure race that doesn't show up in the capex announcements. Hedgie🤗